Tim Grobaty: Judging baking contest is a piece of cake

BAKER'S BANQUET: We don't like writing about ourself, especially in glowing terms, but in the interest of transparency we will grudgingly admit that we are more than adequately equipped to judge and otherwise weigh in on every aspect of humankind's endeavors, from modern art (Jasper Johns is better than David Hockney) to Russian zoology (Dmitry Ivanovsky, discoverer of viruses, gets the nod as our all-Russian starter over Ilya Ivanov who tried to cross a monkey with a human).

We've even judged (juried, anyway) murderers, thieves and crooked cops. So judging baked goods is cake for us. We can judge cookies and pie in our sleep. You just have to figure out a way to get it in our mouth.

On Sunday evening, we were one of the judges of the Justin Rudd-backed Belmont Shore Bake-Off at Bay Shore Church, along with Hollywood's Ralph Millero and Miss Long Beach, Monica Samreth.

We muscled our way through something on the order of 40 pies, cakes, cookies, brownies and cupcakes in about 40 minutes, during which time we went up an entire neck size.

There are some darned fine bakers in town, as it turns out. If we could've talked someone into dollying us back to the front of the judging table, we would've gone back for seconds - and exploded into a fine, pink, sugary mist.

If your life revolves around baked goods, you should do whatever it takes to get on the good side of the evening's champions: Micaela Miranda, for cupcakes (best we've ever had - and bite-sized, so you can eat a dozen of them at a time!); Lorine Iwasaki-Kesslak for cookies; the one and only Gerry Spiers for brownies/bars (in Spiers' case, it was bars, the best, again, we've ever had), Sherri Stankewitz (the Black Dog Syndrome expert we interviewed recently, whose winning entry was a chocolate espresso cake with crumbled roasted coffee beans. We will perhaps sleep again one day, but not soon); and Amy Betty Brown, maybe our favorite baker in Long Beach, won for best pie, which is the same as winning for best thing there is.

HOSTESS GOES: Staying with baking, our hearts and memories go out to the thousands of Bakers Union and other Hostess employees who lost their jobs last week.

Much of the media blamed the company's collapse on unions, overlooking ... well, just about everything, other than the fact that this time the unions involved didn't agree to sign the latest offer made by the company.

A Hostess baker detailed the mess in a heartbreaking story on the Daily Koz. That offer, wrote the worker, included an 8 percent pay cut in the first year with additional cuts totaling 27 percent over five years. The unidentified Hostess baker wrote that he/she made $48,000 in 2005, $34,000 in 2011 and would make $25,000 in 2017.

We all have to make sacrifices? Tell that to the CEO of Hostess who, just before the company filed for bankruptcy, was awarded a 300 percent raise from $750,000 to $2,550,000, or to at least nine of his sidekicks whose paychecks similarly skyrocketed.

And that's to say nothing of those same executives continuing to churn out junk while American eating habits were moving away from their products. And it's to say nothing of the inventive and prosperous hedge-fund vultures who have picked at the bones of the doomed company. There are a lot of reasons for the company's ultimate failure; employees trying to hold on to a decent salary was not one of them.

For those worried about the prospect of finishing off their lives bereft of Twinkies, it's a fairly good bet you'll still be able to buy them (though they almost certainly won't be union-made, maybe not even American-made).